Looking for advice on playing mats

[Brother Tyler]

I've been looking into options for gaming mats and GripMat stands out (though there are a few others I'm looking into). You can see their products here. I've noticed that many of their mats come in a variety of sizes, including Games Workshop's 30"x22" standard game board. For example, see the Grassland play mat.

 

 

The image above is the Grassland play mat, showing the grassland side (top) and the black rubber on the bottom. The top of the play mat is "grippy" to keep things from moving by accident. You can see more details about it here.

 

My focus these days is Kill Team and other small (squad) skirmish wargames. There are a couple of "skirmish" wargames I play (or hope to play) which feature 20-30 models per side. While 30"x22" might be safe for Kill Team, I'll probably go with 3'x3' for a bit more flexibility (I don't limit myself to Kill Team, but those other games are non-GW).

 

I don't want this to look like an advertisement for GripMat, however, so if you have experience with similar products, I'm all ears. Other companies that I'm going to look into include Tablewar (F.A.T. Mats), Deep-Cut Studio, and any others. I'll be purchasing through my FLGS, so I'm not sure if they'll be able to order products from companies outside the U.S. (though I'm happy to ask).

[Antarius]

I have a couple from Deep-Cut and they're quite good. I seem to recall some of them having a bit of a scale issue (the scale of image they've used make some of the plants look a little out of scale, with what looks like small plants and blades of grass being quite big for 28mm), but it's not something that you actually notice a lot when playing on them.

I'd definitely agree that you should go for a mat that's a bit bigger than you think you might need - it's easy enough to just not use the whole mat and it's nice to have options. Mine are 6x4 even though we rarely play on more than 4x4 and it's never been a problem.

You might consider going with a double sided mat for more variety, although you do lose the "grippy" side of course. In practice, I've never found it to be a problem though - the mouse mat material is heavy and semi-grippy enough on its own, in my experience.

Depending on your terrain collection, I would suggest going with a brownish wasteland/muddy field type of mat, as it can more easily be used for several different kinds of environment. It's less immersion-breaking to accept brown city streets as simply being covered with mud and rubble than it is if they're obviously a lush green field, for example 

Edited 9 hours ago by Antarius